Hugh Dellar

In the previous articles, we told you about such experts of the English language as David Crystal,  Herbert Puchta and Scott Thornbury. Now, we’ll talk about another well-known English Language Teaching expert — Hugh Dellar.

Hugh Dellar is a London-based teacher, coursebook writer and teacher trainer. He has over 25 years’ experience in the English Language Teaching field. Hugh Dellar designed a lot of different language and teacher training programmes including CELTA courses and Academic and Pre-sessional English. Hugh Dellar’s written several teacher’s books. He also writes about teaching and language in his blog. Furthermore, he writes for ETP, IATEFL Voices and New Routes. Hugh runs lots of teacher training and professional and language development seminars, workshops, presentations, talks, courses and webinars in more than twenty countries.  His area of interest is material design, developing students’ listening skills, teaching spoken language, lexical approach to language analysis, classroom practice, uses of technology, etc.

Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley (another ELT expert) are co-founders of Lexical Lab. It is a website for teachers who are interested in a lexical approach to teaching. You can find different resources, publications and forthcoming talks there.

In addition, Hugh Dellar has co-authored two five-level General English courses — Outcomes, Perspectives  (includes talks from TED) and Innovations, published by National Geographic Learning. Moreover, “Innovations” was nominated for ESU award and two ELTons.

On top of that, Hugh Dellar is famous for his first methodology book, Teaching Lexically, which was published by DELTA Publishing in 2016. There is an offline course based on this book that is a part of their London summer school. This book is about principals and practice of the lexical approach. “Teaching Lexically” contrasts traditional “grammar + words + skills” approach to a lexical view of language. Three main ideas of this approach are:

1. Context is a key and central thing.
2. Vocabulary and grammar aren’t taught separately but in combination.
3. There must be a lot of useful input in the classroom. 

There are three parts in this book which focus on theory, practice and development.

Part A clarifies the main ideas of the lexical approach. It covers the principles, the reasons why students learn English, how they learn. Then, it presents these two approaches to language teaching:  “grammar + words + skills” and the lexical view.

Part B has lots of activities to practise vocabulary, grammar, listening, reading, etc. The exercises can be applied to any classroom materials, as a result, it helps teachers to create their own techniques for using the lexical approach.

Part C covers how teachers can apply the lexical approach; how to make teacher training and professional development more focused on this approach and how to develop as a lexical material writer.

You can find Hugh Dellar on such social networks as VK, Instagram*, Twitter, Facebook* and YouTube. He posts one-minute English videos where he tells a story (sets the context) and clarifies a lexical chunk.